reed.co.uk recruits Xamarin Platform, Test Cloud, and Insights to take career searches mobile

About reed.co.uk

Highlights

Founded in 1995, reed.co.uk has become the largest job site in the UK, with more than 200,000 live jobs and over three million active candidates. It’s also the UK’s busiest job site, with more than 6,000

applications per hour and over 5,000 new CVs uploaded per day, and 50,000 registrations per week. reed.co.uk launched its Xamarin-built Android app, Jobs, in February of 2015.

• 50% shared code in iOS and Android apps, with expectation-beating performance

• Partnered with Codified to scale development staff while remaining in control

• Shifted to data-driven decision making with Xamarin Test Cloud and Xamarin Insights

From the beginning, reed.co.uk set a demanding quality standard. In addition to providing key features from the website’s functionality, the team wanted to optimize the experience for mobile, including a completely native interface, recommendations, push notifications, and a unique offline mode to allow users to interact when disconnected. With 40% of reed.co.uk’s traffic coming from mobile devices, expectations were high and timelines were short. The company budgeted less than a year for the app from conception to launch, and development began only five months before release.

Needing both an Android and an iOS app, reed.co.uk knew that platform- specific coding was not a viable option. According to Yos Noor, Head of Research

Planning for performance and flexibilityand Innovation, reed.co.uk examined several hybrid app platforms, but “just didn’t feel like the performance was there.” The company chose Xamarin for its combination of C# support and performance. Noor reports, “C# enabled us to do away with having to learn a new language, which would have pushed having apps for multiple platforms out of the realms of possibility,” and estimates that 50% of each app is comprised of shared code. Noor was also pleased that unlike the hybrid app tools they evaluated, “with Xamarin, there’s nothing we haven’t been able to do in terms of performance.”

To meet its aggressive timeline, reed.co.uk partnered with London-based Codified, a Xamarin authorized consulting partner. Unlike more traditional outsourcing firms, Codified worked with reed.co.uk to build internal expertise as the project moved forward. According to Noor, “We wanted internal expertise in mobile app development in the long run, so we engaged Codified to assist and train existing staff alongside recruiting to hire permanent staff.” This kick-start allowed reed.co.uk to begin building the first version of the app right away, without sacrificing the ability to support and further develop the app on their own.

Building and growingThis unique arrangement also helped reed.co.uk feel more comfortable with the direction of the product as the company transitioned into mobile development. “With Codified, we were deeply involved in the development of the app from the outset,” said Noor. “Our in-house developers gained a deep understanding of the app and retained the ability to influence the direction of the app from the beginning, enabling us to maintain our original vision.”

“We initially looked at hybrid app tools, but it didn’t feel like the performance was there. With Xamarin, there’s nothing we haven’t been able to do in terms of performance.”Yos Noor, Head of Research & Innovation at reed.co.uk

As industry leaders, reed.co.uk understands the importance of quality. Testing has always been key to the company’s development life cycle; however, they were quickly limited by their ability to test in-house. According to Noor, “We began receiving reports of bugs on devices we didn’t own and therefore couldn’t replicate.”

reed.co.uk responded by pairing Xamarin Test Cloud with Xamarin Insights. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, the company runs full, bi-weekly regression tests against 130 devices in the two hours it takes to test just one device manually. Xamarin Test Cloud has eliminated the subjectivity of manual bug identification, and has also had a positive effect on reed.co.uk’s manual testers. “We can leave the more mundane testing to Xamarin Test Cloud,” says Noor, “so QA has been freed up to do more specific, interesting testing than the repetitive regression testing that used to consume their days.”

reed.co.uk also runs ad hoc tests against specific devices when they receive bug reports from devices they don’t own. Noor says Xamarin Insights helps

Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise mobile development. No other platform enables businesses to reach 2.6 billion iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows devices with 100% fully native apps from a single shared code base. Xamarin is used by over one million developers from more than 100 Fortune 500 companies to accelerate the creation of mission-critical consumer and enterprise apps. Xamarin’s customer base spans 120 countries and includes Dow Jones, Bosch, Halliburton, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cognizant, GitHub, Rdio, and WebMD. Xamarin is a Visionary in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant.

Testing real-world issues on real devices

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reed.co.uk get ahead of customers in that regard: “In the first three or four versions of the app, Xamarin Insights informed us of stability issues as they occurred. We wouldn’t have caught the bugs as early as we did without Xamarin Insights, because there are so many devices and configurations in the wild.”

reed.co.uk has also seen benefits from using Xamarin Insights and Xamarin Test Cloud together. According to Noor, “There were other suppliers who offered similar solutions, but none offered the kinds of benefits we’ve seen from Xamarin’s integration. The ability to trace a user journey so we can see exactly what led up to an issue, receive detailed information about crashes, and then feed that information into a test run and see step-by-step visuals of what happens on each device has been tremendously helpful.”

“Seeing exactly what led up to an issue in Xamarin Insights, coupled with detailed information about crashes, has been tremendously helpful.”Yos Noor, Head of Research & Innovation

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